Summary: Rolling Stone has posted the not-yet-declassified report by Daniel L. Davis (Lt Colonel, US Army). It deserves your attention, as it attacks a core element of our increasingly militarized government: the integrity of our senior generals — leaders of one of the most-respected institution in America (one of the only two highly respected institutions in America; see Gallup).

Note: This has been updated as new information has come in, esp. the New York Times article.

Davis last month submitted the unclassified report –titled “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leader’s Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” – for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so. Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We’ve decided to publish it in full; it’s well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.

Davis is in a unique position to assess the real situation on the ground in Afghanistan. As a staff officer of the “Rapid Equipping Force,” he traveled more than 9,000 miles to every area where U.S. troop presence was significant and had conversations with more than 250 U.S. soldiers, from privates to division commanders.

(c) Statement by Colonel Davis about the release of this report. Emailed to me; posted with his permission

Michael Hastings got a copy of one of my early drafts (with an ‘as of’ date of 11 January), so it’s not the final version that i handed over to Army PA. i would really have preferred everyone wait until i had the review back from the Army – whenever that would have turned out to be – so I could have posted it myself; I’m already in enough hot water with folks and would have preferred allowing the process to have run its course so I could have run it without further concern about what Army officials may try to do about it. but as they say, what’s done is done and this is what I have to deal with now.

The New York Times posted an article by Scott Shane and what appears to be a later version of the report; it is dated 6 February 2012 and has 86 pages. It has the header “unclassified”, not “Draft”. They also posted a pdf version. Their article calls this “the full unclassified report” that they released because Rolling Stone had already released the report. The following excerpt comes from this version.

(2) Excerpt from Colonel Davis’ report

Opening

Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan. It has likely cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars Congress might not otherwise have appropriated had it known the truth, and our senior leaders’ behavior has almost certainly extended the duration of this war.

The single greatest penalty our Nation has suffered, however, has been that we have lost the blood, limbs and lives of tens of thousands of American Service Members with little to no gain to our country as a consequence of this deception.

Introduction
… In the first section below I will demonstrate how numerous military senior leaders have used omission and outright deception in order to prevent the American public from knowing the truth in regards to the genuine conditions on the ground in Afghanistan. I will explain that there has been a significant volume of information available from numerous and reputable open sources that should have been effective in communicating to the American public the truth of the situation. Owing to numerous factors (the key of which are discussed in detail in subsequent sections of the report), however, the powerful and pervasive personalities of several US general officers have been surprisingly effective at convincing even highly educated Americans to believe what the generals say and not what their eyes and evidence tell them.

In the second section I will help the reader gain a better understanding of how the situation described in Section I came to be. For the most part restricting myself to discussing situations in which I was physically a participant, I will first present a number of facts – many of which will be seen in public for the first time – regarding how Army senior leaders have been deceiving the US Congress and American people on some key modernization programs going back to the 1990s. In this section you will see how despite year after year of Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis done explicitly for the US Congress which showed major and repeating failures in the Future Combat Systems (FCS), the Army’s senior leaders instead told Members of Congress and the US public in press releases that the opposite was true; because Americans have trusted the Army’s leaders more than any other in the country, they accepted the word of the generals and ignored the GAO reports and the physical absence of successful products.

A second major sub-element to this section will be a demonstration – also containing significant new information that has never been seen by the American people – revealing that what virtually the entire country and even a great percentage of our uniformed Service Members believe about how and why the Iraq surge of 2007 was successful, was in fact grossly inaccurate. The version of events that depicted the lion’s share of the causality going to superior US generalship and the adoption of the “protect the population” strategy was created and sustained by a number of key senior US generals. When the full facts are examined, however, it becomes very clear that the surge of troops in 2007 was instrumental at best and according to one senior ground commander who led much of our fight in the Anbar province, “75% to 80% of the credit” for the surge’s success lies elsewhere.

The inaccurate assigning of the reason for the 2007 Iraq surge’s success has profound implications for our current war in Afghanistan and doubly so for the surge forces ordered by the President in late 2009. Had the President known the truth of what really happened in 2007 Iraq it is unlikely he would not have made the decision he did in November/December 2009. In any case, the situation demonstrates a growing and expanding willingness on the part of our country’s senior military leaders to use “Information Operations” even on domestic audiences to manipulate the system in order to get what they want.

… Section III will cover a broad range of negative consequences that our country has paid and will continue to pay until changes are made. We’ve lost credibility with our allies and friends in the region; we’ve lost almost all credibility among even the Afghan population and individual government officials; and our word has no value among our enemies. Many may be tempted to believe it unimportant what our enemies think, but it is almost as important as it is for us to have our closest allies believe in us: at some point this war will have to end in a political settlement of some sort. If our enemy isn’t able to believe the word of our country, we may never find a foundation upon which to reach an agreeable accord to end the war on terms acceptable to us.

Finally I will lay out a few recommendations on a way forward to address these deficiencies.